Germany

German football club Energie Cottbus has apologised and offered to reimburse tickets for fans who travelled to watch the team lose 4-0 to Schalke in the Bundesliga. The team said sorry on its website and promised that about 600 fans who travelled to Gelsenkirchen for Friday's match would be able to get their money back. "You can lose to Schalke," manager Steffen Heidrich wrote, "but we showed far too little resistance against the individual class of our opponent." Cottbus, who lie second bottom with six games left, play the Bundesliga pacesetters Wolfsburg next Sunday. Associated Press in Berlin

Africa

A generation of children in west and central Africa is suffering extreme psychological trauma as a consequence of civil war, Aids and child trafficking, a study has found. Around one in five children interviewed were in serious danger of killing themselves, according to the charity Plan International, whose researchers admitted shock at the "level of despair". More than 1,000 children and young people chosen at random in Liberia, Togo, Sierra Leone, Cameroon and Burkina Faso were psychologically assessed by the charity in what it claims is the first such study. David Smith in Johannesburg